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super%20hexagon

January 3rd

…Material World: The Touch of Clubhouse Games – Uppercut Grace Benfell situates the materiality of Clubhouse Games in the forgetfully-material, often ideologially-fraught wider industry.

  • you are capable of writing better horror stories | GB ‘Doc’ Burford GB Burford assesses the horror genre–in games and elsewhere–as over-reliant on tropes that rob the genre of its essential constituents–uncertainty, attention, and emotion.

    • “So. If I have played a video game where a character feels guilty about some shit or sad about a dead loved one, and the supernatural horror is an extended metaphor for this grief or guilt or…

    June 2021

    …in her own journey of self-discovery. (Autocaptions)

  • Queer Fantasy | Finding Your True Self in Cyberspace – Transparency (49:57)

    Transparency think about how MMORPG spaces, mechanics, and communities (such as those of Final Fantasy XIV) can allow players to explore personal questions of gender and sexuality. (Manual captions)

    • Colonial Reckonings

    These next few videos are about games engaging with, critiquing, and sometimes enacting narratives of invasion and colonialism.

    • Umurangi Generation, Colonialism, UAPs, UFOs and Alien Invasion Stories – Super Bunnyhop (22:54)

      George Weidman takes Umurangi Generation’s representation of colonial apocalypse as a

      …

    April 11th

    …next section is the tension, challenge, and fruits of narrative play through the lenses of player motivation, structure, and negative space.

    • 1984: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy | 50 Years of Text Games Aaron A. Reed delves into Douglas Adams’ subversive, playful, and meta contribution to the early days of interactive fiction.
    • Get a life – The Sims – Super Chart Island Iain Mew, in a discussion of intrinsically-motivated, open-ended play, notes how The Sims‘ unstructutred priorities didn’t wholly surive the transition from PC to console.
    • Kaede | press.exe Talen Lee looks at the rudimentary

    …

    May 16th

    …It Needs to Be, and Exactly What I Didn’t Know I Wanted | Paste Dia Lacina, unbound by nostalgia, turns a seasoned photographer’s eye to New Pokémon Snap.

  • Mirror time – EyeToy: Play – Super Chart Island Iain Mew opens up about the uncanny–and sometimes subversive–act of playing with the EyeToy camera in the Zoom era.
  • Playing New Pokémon Snap with a Pet Photographer | Fanbyte Danielle Riendeau channels the advice and best practices of a pet photographer in approaching New Pokémon Snap.
  • Photos of future ruins — KRITIQAL Nate Kiernan contemplates the role of a chronicler…

    • May 23rd

    …

    “Garrus is literally every cop who has a Punisher sticker on their car. He’s an authoritarian who wants to take the law into his own hands to deal with crime violently. And instead of using his combat skills to help Mordin protect his clinic, he decided to play super hero. Go help with some mutual aid initiatives, ya jerk.”

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    Have you read, seen, heard or otherwise experienced something new…

    September 19th

    …mods about historical figures. And demons. You know how it is.

    • The Complete History of ‘Kaizo Mario’ | GlitchCat7 GlitchCat7 presents an historical overview of romhacking in the Super Mario Bros. games, from the earliest days of cart-swapping and manual hex editors to the thriving communities and tools of the present day.
    • Inside ‘Thatcher’s Techbase’, the ‘Doom’ mod that lets you kill Margaret Thatcher | NME Dom Peppiatt chats with creator Jim Purvis about the process of building the new Doom mod that tasks you with sending the Iron Lady back to hell.

    “It

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    September 2021

    …have dreamed/worried. (No captions)

  • Why is Wario? Just…WHY?! – Video Game Story Time (5:50)

    VGST recounts how Wario’s emergence as the lead character of Super Mario Land 3 happened as the result of a development team feeling creatively stifled. (Manual captions)

    • Good Ideas, Done Poorly

    This next trio look at some places games have handled the representation of social issues and other thematic things unsatisfactorily, despite all the best intentions/marketing.

    • How Bisexuality Changed Video Games – verilybitchie (54:12)

      Verity Ritchie looks at the way ‘mechanical bisexuality’ became prominent in games as a

      …

    January 23rd

    …have in fact found things to admire and appreciate about their respective object texts here, as we close out the week.

    • “Toutius Sextius, do you know him?” – The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – Super Chart Island Iain Mew contemplates freedom in a forest of systems.
    • Mortal Kombat Trilogy (Game.com) – Bad Game Hall of Fame Cassidy reviews Mortal Kombat Trilogy, and perhaps more broadly, the outcome of tasking a single development team with producing all the software for a moribund hardware platform.

    “When looking at these Game.com cartridges in detail, you begin to

    …

    March 13th

    …a simple and brutal model of imperialism.

  • “Torn our world apart” – Gears of War – Super Chart Island Iain Mew observes how, through its attempt to untether itself from the baggage of US Imperialism by abstracting its setting, Gears of War not only upholds its values but posits them as, in all possible wolds, inevitable.
  • Game workers facing authoritarian regimes | RLS Geneva Nikhil Murthy stresses the need for independent game creators to collectivize as a means of protection from authoritarian state power.

    • “India is not unique – the mere act of making games…

    February 2022

    …itself.

    • The Abridged Videogaming History of Big-Money Buyouts & Mergers – Super Bunnyhop (25:20)

      As the title suggests, George Weidman runs through a history of industry buyouts and mergers to explain why this pattern is bad for… well, all of us. (Autocaptions) [Embedded advertising]

    You Were Wrong When You Said

    This video, too, gets a section to itself.

    • What Is Up With Donkey Kong Country 3?! | Dixie Kong’s Gender Trouble – Transparency (1:01:00)

      In a compelling bit of analysis, Transparency argue that the coding of gender roles in the Donkey

    …